Is The “Paleolithic Diet” Really Better? In general, over a long period of time, our ancestors developed an ability to take a broader and broader range of things into the diet. Tools, including fire, gave them access to an unprecedented variety of foods, which meant they could live in more places and find something everywhere they went.

Although there’s an extraordinary range of variation, based on the climate and the environment, hunter-gatherers get a fair amount of meat in their diet. We require a diet that is more energy-dense than other primates and historically, we may have reached that point by incorporating more meat. It’s reflected in evolutionary changes in our face, our teeth, and in our gastrointestinal tract. Indeed, the GI tract of modern humans looks more like a carnivore’s than a large primate’s. Humans evolved to eat a high-quality diet, but that doesn’t mean eating a lot of meat—especially today.

And…In the early Upper Paleolithic periods, there’s evidence early humans were making flours and pastes. Each day, they need to take in a sufficiency of good quality energetic substrate (sugars and starches) and enough protein—say 70 grams or so—to meet their daily requirements for amino acids. In the modern, industrial world, we have become ever better at creating diets that are dense in calories and don’t require a lot of energy to procure them. No one recommendation is going to fit everybody, so the challenge is to find what works for you individually, and, at the same time, what fits the broad nutritional requirements of our species. The diet may be perfectly good, but its theoretical underpinnings are wrong. The Paleolithic period is very long and very varied. Are you talking about the Middle Stone Age of Africa? Or the Upper Paleolithic of Europe. They were eating completely different things. We’re in a quest to understand that, but, to say, this is how you have to eat because this is how our ancestors ate is a fallacy. …just saying http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2j8zNu/www.good.is/post/good-asks-the-experts-is-the-paleolithic-diet-really-better/?utm_source=supr